I am a scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. I have spent many summers traveling to remote regions around the world in search of undisturbed, climate-sensitive, old-aged trees. The field of tree-ring science, or dendrochronology, uses the annual growth variation of long-lived trees to better understand what the climate was like over hundreds, even thousands of years. The tree-ring based climate records that I create can be used to reveal the full range of past climate variability, which may be much larger than what is captured by the limited instrumental records we have. Developing long-term climate records can further our understanding of present and future climate change.